French-Canadian Québécois 40something manchild David (Patrick Huard) is constantly letting down friends and family with his unreliability, and now he might have lots of new people to disappoint: the 142 offspring he fathered via sperm donation years earlier. There’s many more of them, actually -- 533 -- but only 142 are party to a class-action lawsuit to get a Montreal fertility clinic to reveal the identity of the donor they have in common, known to them only as “Starbuck.” The legalities of such a situation are brushed aside in a way that is actively offensive from a narrative perspective: overpowering feel-good music is the only soundtrack for the couple of courtroom scenes, so we have no idea of the relative merits of either side of the case, for or against David retaining his anonymity; and the legal, moral, and ethical culpabilities on the part of the clinic aren’t even mentioned at all.
Alas, there’s little hint, in the script by director Ken Scott and Martin Petit, of any other basis upon which to float such a tale: you know, emotional motives, stuff like that. Why do these 142 people feel entitled to Starbuck’s identity? Where are the families they grew up in, and what do they think about this quest? David’s offspring are barely characters, and there’s so many of them simply jammed into supposedly hilarious crowd scenes -- ha ha, David is the dad of all of them! -- that they might as well be random people pulled in off the street to fill a scene. (For a smart, intriguing look at a similar, though less extreme, real-life situation, see the wonderful documentary Donor Unknown, which I would not at all be surprised to learn was the inspiration for this wholly, even absurdly fictional film.) And what’s David’s deal? Why does he want to remain anonymous... and why, at the same time, does he feel compelled to become “guardian angels” for these 142 plaintiffs? His “lovable” side pops up in ways that add to the illogic of the story on the most basic level: How is he, a complete stranger, able to befriend one severely mentally and physically handicapped young man, even take him out for the day from the residential home where lives, without metaphoric and perhaps even literal alarm bells going off? And how is this young man, who does not appear able to communicate, part of the class-action group? If he has close friends or family working on the lawsuit on his behalf, why don’t they notice the stranger hanging around?
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